This invention relates to a mixed manual and spoken user interface for telematics systems.
There is an increasing amount of concern about the safe operation of telematics systems such as motor vehicle based telematics. Such systems include vehicle navigation systems and cellular telephones. This concern is reflected in standard-setting activities, for example, that are addressing acceptable amounts of time required for a driver of a motor vehicle to input a request for a telematics function. Such input may be a destination for a route-planning function of a navigation system. In addition to standards-setting activities, there may be legislation or regulation concerning this issue.
It has been suggested that automatic voice recognition can be used as the input to the telematics system to relieve the visual distraction problem. While in principle voice recognition seems to be a perfect solution, there are certain serious problems. While voice recognition was already demonstrated several decades ago, it is still far from 100% reliable, particularly in noisy vehicle environments. Since telematics systems often include menu-based interfaces, a system using purely spoken input without other prompting requires the user to memorize a menu tree in order to use the system. Voice recognition systems also require relatively large amounts of memory and computational power thus making vehicle telematics more expensive.